Printing has been with us for more than 600 years but not a lot is known about the earliest printed books. Researchers are using new technology to discover more about how the earliest books were produced.
The typed word dominates our lives today, but it’s still a relatively fresh invention in the timeline of humanity—and despite how drastically printing altered our societies, there’s still a lot we don’t know about its early history. Recently, a team of scientists put some of the earliest known printed documents through a high-powered X-ray examination at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, to better understand how these texts were produced.
The first printed documents were made in Asia using woodblocks by 600 CE, a process called xylography. Centuries later, Johannes Gutenberg used a retooled wine press and a set of metal pieces to make a couple hundred bibles using movable type, an innovation that drastically sped up the rate at which information could be printed.
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